White Sands

The rapidly decreasing length of my internship (only 2 1/2 more weeks!) has encouraged me to focus on checking off the cool sites near here that I want to see before I leave. Granted, this 'weekend' (i.e. today and tomorrow, my days off) I'm hanging around GUMO and Carlsbad and catching up on sleep, but last weekend I went on a mini overnight adventure to White Sands National Monument.

I started my weekend on Wednesday, leaving GUMO around 9 and stopping in Carlsbad to replace my Camelbak mouthpiece (a mouse has chewed through my old one a week earlier). After that it was on to Cloudcroft, NM and the Sacramento Ranger District of the Lincoln National Forest. This was a really cool place. The forest here is higher than at Guadalupe and much thicker and larger, with no remnants of desert plants like Yucca or Agava like you see in the Bowl at GUMO. It was also about 15 degrees cooler than the desert, which was nice. I stopped by the Bluff Springs waterfall, Sunspot Observatory, Osha Trail, and discovered the Trestle Rec Area at dusk, which was unfortunate because that was probably the coolest place I found, and I didn't have near enough time to explore it. I ended up running the 2.5 mile trail to see the old railroad trestle to beat the darkness and catch sunset at the overlook near the parking area.

After that I had a great dinner and proceded to a national forest campground to spend my first ever night camping by myself. It could've gone better probably. Given my wild imagination I quickly spooked myself in the darkness and spent maybe 30 minutes sitting next to the Jeep drinking a beer before diving into my tent and falling asleep as quickly as I could. Hearing Elk snorting nearby didn't help my situation, as I quickly tried to think of what mood a bear would have to be in to make that sound. My stupid mind settled on 'starving'.

The next day I got up early and drove out of the mountains down into the Tularosa valley and White Sands National Monument. I met their resident SCA intern and then headed out into the dunes on the 4.6 Alkali Flats trail. If you ever go there, definitely hike this trail, but use sunscreen on all exposed skin. The sunlight reflecting of the white sand makes the sun exposure like skiing without all the protective clothes. I scorched my shins. The Jeep and I also enjoyed driving on the unpaved, compacted sand roads.

My next stop was a spontaneous decision to visit the White Sands Missile Range headquarters. The museum had some cool displays and artifacts, but this place is still and active testing ground so there were some interesting restrictions on taking photos. I could take photos outside, which surprised me actually, but I could only take them of the missiles on display while I was facing West. I kept looking around for the army private who would tackle me if I turned towards the East, but I didn't see him. I also was not allowed to take photos of any part of the base besides the missile park and was especially not allowed to take photos of the entrance.

The adventure continues as I drove down to El Paso, arriving around dusk to explore the roads around and within the Franklin Mountains. I got some pretty good views, and then decided to drive through downtown where I proceeded to get slightly lost and come closer than I wanted to accidentally going to Mexico. Though I breifly considered purposely going to Mexico when I saw a stadium full of red-clad fans watching a soccer game just across the Rio Grande in Juarez. Thoughts of swine flu and the recent drug wars quickly pushed that idea from my mind though.

I spent enough time wandering around El Paso that I drove the 90 minutes back to GUMO in the dark. My sunset views of the western escarpment will have to wait until another day I suppose.

Hey, Where'd Everyone Go?

I'll revisit the community of people I live with this week. It's been nearly a month since I first wrote about my seasonal housing mates and I'm happy to remote that as we got to know each better, initial judgments and prejudices were forgotten. Now I just have to learn not to judge people immediately, and potentially not to judge people until I've talked with them multiple times, I'd expect the same of other people trying to get to know me. The more I talked to people here the more interesting they became. I found out a couple of my 10 person social circle went used one of their days off every week to go to Van Horn and take an EMT class. Others have worked at GUMO for years and have a lot of interesting stories, like the Law Enforcement officer who once caught a Brown Pelican in the park. It had been blown here from California by especially strong winds. I also found out a couple of them lived in Carlsbad most of the time, further shrinking my park housing social network.

Unfortunately, as soon as I got to know everyone better, a wave of people left. And by wave of people I mean 3. But 3 is a lot when you're starting with 10. The most recent 2 to leave were a couple who headed to Montana a couple week ago. The guy was my housemate, so they were always in our house cooking or hanging out. With them gone I pretty much have the place to myself. My other housemate hangs out with a good friend of his the whole time. Their departure felt like more than 2 people though. They had been at GUMO a while, so knew everyone well, and were well liked. People would come over and hang out with them, and social gatherings of 4-6 people were pretty common. With them gone those people don't come over anymore. My group of friends that I could potentially hang out with on a given night is now down to 2, and while its nice to have so much space in my house to myself, it feels lonely sometimes. Also not helping is that when my housemate departed, he took with him his collection of DVDs. Evening entertainment has since been limited to reading, and possibly studying for Yellowstone or writing the journal article on my Dartmouth senior thesis. The satellite TV is still around of course, so maybe I'll become interested in the NBA playoffs at some point soon.

On the other hand, I'm getting to know those 2 remaining people very well, and talk to them most nights for at least an hour or so, which is fun. More people should be arriving this month, but then I'll be leaving soon after that. Things are settling into a routine a little bit, but that's not a bad thing, especially when that routine involves hiking in a national park most days and playing basketball every day after work while the sun sets over the mountains.